Child sex abuse victim will try to vanquish silence

TOWN SQUARE

April 05, 2012|Bill White

Sometime on Easter Sunday, Tom Burick will climb aboard his little 50cc Honda scooter and take off on what he expects will be a 10,000-mile, three-nation Journey From Silence to combat child sex abuse by raising money and awareness.

The western Pennsylvania man's point of departure — and the point to which he'll return at the end — will be the street in front of a retirement high-rise in Westmoreland County. More on that later.

Burick planned his trip so that when you trace his path on a map, it forms a heart, one of the symbols used by all three social agency beneficiaries of his fundraising goals. The southernmost point is the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City. The upper humps of the heart extend into Canada.

I mentioned Burick last November in a column pushing for state House Bills 832 and 878, both of which would adjust statutes of limitations in connection with child sex abuse to make it easier for victims to finally name and confront their abusers. These crucial bills remain stalled in the House Judiciary Committee, where Chairman Ron Marsico, R-Dauphin, has buried them for more than a year so they can't be discussed and voted upon in the full House. I think it's a disgrace.

Burick says he was repeatedly molested by an extended family member in 1982 at the age of 14. When he finally got the courage to tell his parents two years later, they refused to contact authorities.

"A part of my soul died when that monster molested me," he wrote in response to one of my blog posts about the bills. "The other part died when my parents refused me justice."

Burick, who runs his own IT company, had stumbled across my blog after the events at Penn State began rekindling his own horrible memories. I was so blown away by his account of what happened and how it affected his life that I contacted him to ask if I could quote it as part of a column — and use his name.

I didn't understand at the time just how significant all this would be to him. He told me he was terrified by the idea of actually being named in connection with child abuse, a stigma he cringed from. But he decided he was tired of being afraid. Talking about it still makes him emotional.

"When I read that article," he told me, "something really changed inside of me. To see my name in that article, to see those words in my own voice, I think that's when things started to pick up speed and change."

He had counseling for a while in his teens, and he thought at the time that it had "fixed" him. But eventually, he figured out that he had barely scratched the surface. "Ninety percent of it was still inside of me, eating me from the inside out."

The help he needed to continue his healing came from a surprising source. Burick, who lives in Westmoreland County, was staying in Myrtle Beach, S.C., last winter and decided to begin looking for a counselor who specialized in survivors of child sex abuse. He wasn't having much luck, and on a whim, he called the Horry County Rape Crisis Center there to see if they could direct him to someone — and learned that they worked not just with rape victims, but also with sex abuse survivors. What ensued, he says, was miraculous.

"The changes internally have just been incredible," he says. "It's one of most amazing groups of women I have ever met. Getting counseling down there just made a world of difference."

In fact, his trip will take him directly from Westmoreland County to Myrtle Beach, where he'll be one of the speakers at a candlelight vigil for survivors of sexual abuse. That organization will be one beneficiary of his fundraising, from which he hopes to raise $20,000. You can read much more about that and other details of his trip, as well as make donations, at his website, journeyfromsilence.com.

As I talked to him again the other day, I was struck by how much stronger and more confident he seemed. I never could have imagined that the guy I talked to just four months ago would not only have opened up this far, but would be channeling his newfound resolve into what he hopes will be a nationally publicized 10,000-mile, six- to eight-month trip on a vehicle that can't go faster than 35 miles per hour, even on a flat surface with the wind behind you.

"This is pretty crazy," he concedes.

I'm out of space, and I want to tell you more about his trip, what he hopes to accomplish, one little problem with his excursion into Mexico and especially, about the chilling significance of that starting and ending point in Westmoreland County.